How to find Relevant Instagram Hashtags for your Business

Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms in recent years with more than one billion active users every month. Making sure that your business is present on Instagram is a great way to find new customers and sell your products and services; 81% of Instagram users use the app as a tool to research new products, so its essential that you know what you’re doing when it comes to creating valuable social content. Instagram for business has become a powerful tool that can effectively build brand awareness and promote your aesthetics clinic; discover how to use Instagram for Business and make the most of its' tools and analytics. 

The Instagram algorithm changes all the time, meaning that you have to constantly keep up with the new trends in order to successfully target your audience, expand your reach, and post engaging content. However, hashtags have stayed relatively consistent since Instagram’s birth in 2010. 

Instagram hashtags can help you to better reach your target audience and organically grow your online following. There are thousands of hashtags on Instagram, so finding the right hashtag to effectively reach your desired community can be a challenge. If you determine the right process for researching hashtags, you can then use them to find users who are interested in your products and services. 

Instagram hashtags can be a mixture of numbers, letters, words or emojis heralded by the hash symbol (#). This symbol has become a way to make your Instagram posts more discoverable by targeting specific categories, communities, and audiences who are present on Instagram. If you were planning to release a post relating to anti-ageing treatments, you might use #antiageingtreatment which has over 11.8K posts; this means that your post will appear among all the other posts using this hashtag, and so when someone searches for this hashtag, they are more likely to find your post.

Using hashtags is one of the best ways to get discovered by users who are interested in your industry. There are more than 95 million posts shared to Instagram every single day, so it is extremely easy for your content to get lost and forgotten.

Hashtags are an easy way to sort your posts into categories which are relevant to your business, ensuring that the right people find content that is specifically useful to them. This is beneficial for you too, because it means that the people interested in aesthetic treatments and skin care will also be able to find your account!

There are a variety of different hashtags that can be used for many different purposes. Here are a few of the hashtag types

These hashtags are exactly what they sound like, they describe the industry that you are working in. So, fo example, you might use #aestheticians, #cosmeticindustry or #skinclinic; these hashtags describe the field that you work in, making it easier for potential clients to discover your Instagram page.

These allow you to get a little more specific to narrow down what users are searching for. These hashtags directly describe what you do, such as #dentalaesthetics or #facialaesthetics.

These are hashtags that relate to an event or ongoing celebration that may be relevant to your industry. For example, in April, there is an event called ‘World Health Day’, and in May, there is a week dedicated to Mental Health Awareness. For these events, you may use hashtags such as #mentalhealthawarenessweek or #worldhealthday. Keeping up with these annual events will help your Instagram page to stay current and reach a wider audience that are interested in these topics.

Once again, the clue is in the name. Location hashtags allow you to highlight where your clinic is based so you can appeal to local customers and tell users where they can find you.

These refer to each day of the week and what they are associated with such as #mondaymotivation, #tuesdaythoughts, #wednesdaywisdom, #throwbackthursday or #fridayfeeling.

Using a variety of hashtag types will allow you to keep all of your social content up to date as well as focusing on audiences relevant to aesthetics and skincare.

To find Instagram hashtags that will work well for your business, you can start by looking at what hashtags your target audience use. If your audience are women who focus on taking care of their skin, they might use hashtags like #skincaredaily, #skincareessentials and #skincareproduct. By establishing which hashtags are most used by your current customers and potential clients, you will be able to find more people with similar interests who fit your customer profile. 

Of course, you never want to compare yourself to your competitors because every aesthetics clinic is unique with different missions & goals. However, it can’t hurt to check out the competition to get some new ideas and inspiration that you can use to your benefit. Research clinics that are similar to you and look at what hashtags they are using; if these competitors are getting high levels of engagement on their posts, it may be worth trying out a few of their hashtags to see if this helps your own engagement rating. It is also a good way of finding out what’s trending in the aesthetics industry and what trends you could follow to grab people’s attention.

On Instagram, you are able to research the top hashtags by going to the search bar, typing in a hashtag relating to your business, i.e. #facialaesthetics, and then click on ‘Tags’. This will bring up a bunch of related hashtags that you can use for your social posts, it will also show you how many posts have been used that particular hashtag. 

Sometimes, Instagram hashtags will be banned because of reports from users that claim these hash tagged posts go against Instagram’s community guidelines or because the hashtag originated from a spam account. To find banned hashtags, you can type the hashtag into the Instagram search bar and if it comes up with a message that says ‘no hashtags found’ or if it says ‘posts from this hashtag are currently hidden’, this means that the hashtag is banned or under review. If you use these hashtags on your posts, it could lead to your account being shadow banned; this means that Instagram will show your content to less users and ultimately limit your reach.

Although you want to reach as many users as possible, you don’t want to use the most popular hashtags on Instagram. The reason for this is because your post is likely to get lost in a sea of posts with hashtags that have over a billion posts. Getting niche with your hashtags ensures that you have a better chance of being discovered by your target audience. Any hashtag with more than a million posts is a no go

To monitor how well your hashtags are doing on Instagram, look at your post insights. Go to a post that received high levels of engagement (i.e. likes, comments, shares) and then click ‘view insights’; if you scroll down, you will be able to see how many people found this post through the hashtags that you used. Keeping track of how well your hashtags are doing will tell you whether they are helping to expand your reach; if they are not, you need to explore more hashtags and identify the ones that do work; it is a case of trial and error backed up by research.

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Knowing your way around Instagram and making the most of hashtags can really help to find potential clients and grow your online audience. Keeping up with social media trends and features can be a challenge, so if your business needs a little extra help managing your social media, book a free consultation with us today.